Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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There is the verbal information and the ideas connected to this. Then there are the images, the way people behave, their movements, mannerisms, forcefulness or peacefulness, their style of emoting, their tone of voice, their way of relating to each other, the kind of people they are, their seriousness, grimness, lightness, joyfulness, heaviness and so on. We absorb these along with the objective news. They are all content as much as my walk is for Kai, or his gentle way is for me.

If you see Kissinger or Cronkite or Bionic people or slaps on the back or kisses or violence-the images of these are not in the realm of correct or incorrect. They just are. There's nothing to disagree with. There's no way to resist them. They flow inward, passing through all discernment processes. Even if you could keep your mind alive while watching-no mean feat-the images would still enter into your unconscious storage areas. You've got them. They're yours.

You may not believe Jimmy Carter when he speaks. But you've got Jimmy Carter inside you.

You may believe the Fonz is an actor, and your kids may believe this too. But they slowly become like the Fonz. They move and walk as he does.

You may believe the Bionic Man is fiction, but his image lives within you. You can bring it to mind if I ask. It is part of your image pool. You may draw on it forever.

You may watch television and "know" those are actors performing, but the image of one person stabbing another is in you. You've got it. It's yours. Thinking will not halt its entry into you or into thirty million others.

You may watch the actor playing doctor in the commercial, speaking seriously, authoritatively. You know this is an actor, but you ingest him nonetheless. His authoritativeness becomes yours.

We all become more like Cronkite, like Carter, like Bionic people. We all become more violent or more Fonzlike, or display a TV-announcer authority.

Once they are in your mind and stored, all images are equally valid. They are real whether they are toothpaste, Walter Cronkite, Kojak, President Carter, Mary Hartman, Captain Kangaroo, Marcus Welby, Pete Rose, a Ford Cougar, a cougar, the Fonz, the Bionic Man, Alistair Cooke, Rhoda, or your mother and father. Once inside your head, they all become images that you continue to carry in memory. They become equally real and equally not-real.

Our thinking processes can't save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell, for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant places. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images. We have lost control of our minds.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Part one of Jerry Mander's fourth argument will be published in MOTHER NO. 59.

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